How long does it take to build an e-commerce website? As little as a few hours! Not kidding!
This afternoon, I took an existing website, in 2.5 hours I had installed commerce, set up product with variations and attributes, configured payments, shipping and tweaked the pages of the website it was on. But you’re saying “that’s not a whole e-commerce site!” But I did one of those, too, in under a week, over the summer.
Let’s break down the basic tasks for setting up an e-commerce website. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m using WordPress but I’ve also done the same thing on SaaS platforms like SquareSpace and the process is the same.
- Decide on your products: their attributes (like color or size), whether you need add-ons or plugins for custom products like file uploader or custom input fields
- Create a basic logo for your business – even your business name in a nice typeface is a good start. Canva and Adobe Express can help if you do not have a designer yet.
- Take product and header photos. For product photos, use what you have now – you can always take better photos later.
- For header photos, collage some product photos on a background, or take a neutral background photo and add product cutouts
- Write the following pages of copy: Home, about/contact, product
Once you have those items assembled, it’s time to build
You’ll need WordPress installed on a server, once you have that, you can begin building:
- Set up your theme and design (header, logo, basic structure)
- Add your products in, including attributes, and variations, prices
- Configure shipping
- Configure your preferred payment provider
- Build a home page with content and add your product grid to it
- Build a shop page (alternative way for customers to shop your products, especially if you have a bunch of them) – Woo Commerce builds this for you, so you do not need to do that if you are using that, just set up a menu link for it
- Create your menu (again WordPress mostly does this for you, you can tweak it)
- Take a break
When you return to your store, take a fresh look at it:
Does it answer the customer’s basic questions on what is it, how do they order, when will it arrive? If you need to educate customers on installation or use, does the site have instructions on it? Is your contact information available on your about page? Your about page should be about why you started this business and what you can do to help your customer with your contact info so they can reach you by your preferred methods.
You CAN build a basic e-commerce website in a few days, and then build as you grow the site. Don’t be afraid to continually make changes to your website. Edit, review, refine and ask customers. When they provide feedback, listen, modify and see improvements.
Ask yourself “How can I make it easier for customers to order from me?”
In our case, customers would fill out this form, and more or less expect to hear from us that we’d received their order! So we said, hey, why not make it easier on us and them to have them just pay online right up front.
Key aspects on this order process – we require a 100 unit minimum, and we price by the unit (so, $1.25 per item, $125 is the product price). But we also need to include a fee for their custom artwork prep, so we build it in and we tell them $30 per order file setup fee (one time.) Whatever your type of order, whether it’s unit price, or a bulk order like we do, you can build that into the product and tell the customer in the short description right above the “add to cart” button.
It is not only possible, it’s absolutely doable to have an e-commerce website up in under a week
If you have thousands of products, it will take longer. Dozens? Might take the whole week. A few? Get ready for your new site. Why do we recommend hosting your own site?
Shopify was down on Cyber Monday. Etsy traffic has tanked for many operators and is so full of AI slop that it’s almost useless for users. These “easy to use” platforms are taking a ton of your money and they’re not delivering the kind of traffic or stability you want.
I hear you “but WordPress is hard” – it’s no harder than Shopify and Etsy. In fact, ALL product-e-commerce sites function basically the same way – products have attributes and variations that need to be set up – along with photos and pricing. Stores have commerce to be set up and shipping to be configured. These haven’t changed in the 25 years I’ve developed websites, and they are largely the same across platforms. I think WordPress scares people, but with my one-hour World Famous WordPress training, you’ll be ready and confident to take your store online. I don’t say that lightly, just that with hundreds of sites and a thousand hours training people (maybe more), I’ve got it down to a science and I can teach anyone. Yes, anyone, even the most tech-adverse!
The reasons to switch to self-hosted WordPress are many, and with the outages and algorithm and outright slop out there, there’s really never been a more important time to reconsider being on these mass platforms. Oh, and the SEO is better too 😉 All the more reason to consider setting up a site outside of a big platform and on your own space!
Can I help you get started?
